Web Design News & Articles

Compuware released the results of its Black Friday to Cyber Monday research and offers practical tips to help online retailers maximize the remainder of the holiday shopping season.

How do you use Stumbleupon? The discovery engine is reportedly responsible for delivering more than half of all social media referral traffic in the U.S. -- even more than Facebook and Twitter. What does this mean and why should you care?

Those Google Sites (news, site) will look better instantly with a touch of mobile magic, offering better fit and alignment of page elements for your pages.

In the past two years since we reported on the Ten Best Practices for Website Landing Pages, the dynamic of the web has shifted. From mobile websites to mobile applications accessed by a variety of mobile devices, the traditional rules that govern landing pages has also evolved.

Big redesigns are a very dangerous strategy. Continuous improvement of your customers' top tasks is much better. 

As web managers struggle to improve their websites, it's increasingly clear that standard tools and practices are failing the cause. Here are 3 important guidelines that will pay dividends -- re-shaping how you approach web optimization.

Online visitors form a first impression of a website quicker than the blink of an eye -- literally. It typically takes humans 300 to 400 milliseconds to blink. Meanwhile, scientific research led by Dr. Gitte Lindgaard at Carleton University in Ontario reveals websites have as little as 50 milliseconds to establish a first impression -- a mere 1/20th of a second. That’s it!

In 2007, Gerry McGovern, our resident sage advisor, wrote that web design is the design of words. Three years later, he is still as accurate as ever. In that time, many new media have come and gone, but through it all, the website still remains a primary platform for engaging customers, readers and everyone in between.

No other single factor causes greater customer frustration and dissatisfaction than confusing menus and links.

Next time you have a chance to watch someone reading a map, look for the first thing they do. They'll likely do the exact same thing everyone else does: find themselves on the map.

It doesn't matter what kind of map it is, whether it's of their neighborhood or an amusement park. They'll open the map and find something that is personally meaningful, such as their house or their favorite roller coaster.

Psychologists call this 'grounding'—the natural behavior of initially finding a known reference point in a foreign information space. Once the person has grounded themselves, they can then use the starting point to understand the rest of the space.

While grounding helps people adjust to complex situations, it can be detrimental when it happens during the design process. If, while conjuring up an interface, designers ground themselves in the design, they run the serious risk of creating an interface that only they can use.

Never make management decisions for a website based on opinions. There is often a Jekyll and Hyde difference between what people say and what they do.

The organization is a tribe and the customer is a stranger. That's why it's so hard to be customer-centric.

Advertising agencies don't get the Web because the web is the place people go to do things.

The history of social interface design can be divided into two periods: Before Flickr and after Flickr. In the first period, any social interface functionality was added as an afterthought to the design—something to layer on top of the core functionality. In the after Flickr period, teams were now considering social components as core to their design's value.

Working with contractors or 3rd parties, like any relationship, is a two-sided affair. Here are some tips for keeping your Web projects running smoothly.